This paper reports a study on the modification of a commercial selective laser sintering
(SLS) machine for the fabrication of tissue engineering scaffolds from small quantities of
poly(L-lactide) (PLLA) microspheres. A miniature build platform was designed, fabricated and
installed in the build cylinder of a Sinterstation 2000 system. Porous scaffolds in the form of
rectangular prism, 12.7×12.7×25.4 mm3, with interconnected square and round channels were
designed using SolidWorks. For initial trials, DuraFormTM polyamide powder was used to build
scaffolds with a designed porosity of ~70%. The actual porosity was found to be ~83%, which
indicated that the sintered regions were not fully dense. PLLA microspheres in the size range of 5-30
μm were made using an oil-in-water emulsion solvent evaporation procedure and they were suitable
for the SLS process. A porous scaffold was sintered from the PLLA microspheres with a laser power
of 15W and a part bed temperature of 60oC. SEM examination showed that the PLLA microspheres
were partially melted to form the scaffold. This study has demonstrated that it is feasible to build
tissue engineering scaffolds from small amounts of biomaterials using a commercial SLS machine
with suitable modifications.